Comment by nsbk
2 days ago
I'm short on time and couldn't read the whole article, but apparently metabolic health is a huge factor that doesn't seem to be pointed at here. Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Same goes for other metabolic health impacting factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and the likes.
The paper says there is no epidemic and never was. The only increase is in diagnosis. That is due to a number of causes like changing the criteria for diagnosis, adding incentives to be diagnosed, and several other things. The two strongest arguments presented were that autism isn't rarer in adults, and some studies that involved testing with tests that haven't changed over the period didn't see a change in actual scores even though diagnosis increased. My personal thoughts are that autoimmune conditions that have similar effects to some aspects of autism are demonstrared to increasing, and when that happens in young people it gets diagnosed as asd because that has a name and gets extra services vs having some poorly understood autoimmune thing.
> Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates.
Even assuming the first sentence is correct going from 0% prevalence to 100% prevalence of something with a 4x risk increase would explain only a very small part of the increase in the various proxies by which the prevalence is estimated, whereas (as the article argues) change in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices can easily explain all of it. So, sure, to the extent there is any real increase in prevalence (which is not at all clear), factors like parental obesity, parental age, and other things that have some indication of being either risk factors or proxies for unidentified risk factors may either play a role or be indicative of things that do, but we can be fairly certain what the main driving factor in the numbers is, and it is sufficient to explain the observations, and invoking anything else is a violation of the principal of parsimony.
I'm talking about it in another thread too, but large birth weight is apparently a pretty significanly correlated risk factor for developing ASD. Studies show that obese mothers are more likely to give birth to higher weight children.
Very unfortunate for us, then, that there's dozens of independent multibillion dollar industries who are not going to like that that's the root cause :/
Fortunately, there are independent multibillion dollar industries who would prefer to solve it with semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retratutide.
Of course, the article makes the case that there's no epidemic so none of this is really important. We don't have to go "oh woe is me oh woe is me" constantly.
How does obesity correlate with IQ? As the article points out:
> So much spending on care for autistic people is wasteful. Someone with a mild case of Asperger’s does not need to hit a mandated spending cap for their condition, and someone with mental retardation who convinced a clinician to give them a more favorable diagnosis should not be receiving treatment intended for autistics and found to be useless for the merely mentally retarded.
More importantly, even if the article didn’t specifically address your concerns about metabolic health, it certainly gave a plethora of reasons for why the “rising autism rates” are not rising in truth.
> So remember this:
> There is not, and has never been, any credible evidence for a “real” epidemic of autism or for any of its proposed environmental causes. Answering the question of if there is a “real” autism epidemic has provided a complete answer to the question of why there might be.
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